Without a word, “without a word” underlined, I’d got up and left my mother alone in the kitchen, and I went away from Altensam, down to the Aurach, into Hoeller’s house. Away from the argument with my mother, into the silence of the Hoellers. Sitting at the table in Hoeller’s family room, having supper with the Hoellers, eating something different from what they were eating, underlined, still affected by my argument with my mother and so I was in a debilitated condition as the Hoellers watched me, after I’d previously been watched by my mother, but watched differently by the Hoellers than by my mother, how differently, “how” underlined, that’s indescribable, but it was an entirely different kind of look, because it was an entirely different perceptiveness, because the Hoellers are different from the Altensam people, I thought, but it’s not a greater simplicity, the so-called simple folk are not really simple, I was on the one hand still affected by the argument with my mother, about the new color job on the farm building, and also affected by the silence between mother and me in the Altensam kitchen, that condition of silence between me and my mother, realizing that again we’d had the argument both of us, I as well as my mother, always dreaded, once I’d announced my homecoming to Altensam, and which had of course broken out again this time, whether it’s the new color job on the farm building, or some purchase, or a sale, some real estate speculation on which I or my mother can’t agree, or as it might be father, by this time totally withdrawn and hardly noticeable any longer, who serves to trigger it off, then on the other hand the silence in Hoeller’s room, under the effect of which I was now condemned to the same speechlessness as the Hoellers sitting at table with me. The whole time not a single word at the Hoellers’ table, when supper was over the Hoellers stood up, including Hoeller himself, his wife cleared the table, in silence, they all walked out of the room, in silence, the children following their mother into the kitchen to do the washing up, Hoeller went to the hall, I followed him and it was only then, after I had thanked him for my supper, that I was able to come out with my reason for coming down to the Hoeller house this very evening of my arrival, I told him I wanted to lodge at his house for a while, could he, as a favor, let me room in his garret for a while, I found myself able, as I had not expected to be, to explain my wish, which I had simply reeled off to Hoeller, who was totally unprepared to hear it, I said to him that to look at this house, to study it, explore it, as well as yourself and everything connected with you and your house, will be the best preparation for my plan to build the Cone. Hoeller agreed to my proposal, he said I could move in tomorrow morning, I said I’d bring only the barest necessities with me, he told me I could stay in the garret as long as I liked, as long as I needed, it would be a pleasure for him to have my company for a time, the mere idea was a pleasure, so Roithamer. We’d spent only a few minutes in the hall, then Hoeller had to go to his workshop, so I said good-bye, it was a relief to know, even if only briefly, that I no longer had to fear having to stay in Altensam, where I’d hoped to relax and restore myself a little, for quite a while as I’d thought, under these, “these,” underlined, terrible circumstances, a groundless fear now, and so I took a detour, past a hazel hedge I’d loved as a child, back up to Altensam, and withdrew to my room after showing myself briefly to my brothers, my sister was visiting a friend in town. After a sleepless night, like my nights in England for quite a while now, I’d gone quite early, I think it was five in the morning, to Hoeller’s house, Hoeller was already up and at work in his workshop at that hour, in order to study it scientifically from the first moment, I was all set to look and study and explore the Hoeller house most thoroughly and with the greatest pleasure from the first. To begin with I immediately had the chance to make comparisons, looking at Hoeller and looking at his house, studying Hoeller and studying his house, what was characteristic of Hoeller was also characteristic of his house, the house inside was like Hoeller inside, by studying the Hoeller house I had a sudden insight into Hoeller and, conversely, by studying Hoeller, I had insight into the house, one served as a simultaneous illumination of the other. I could have said without hesitation, so Roithamer, Hoeller’s inside is the same as the inside of his house. I could have said that the strength (or weakness) of Hoeller’s character clearly manifests itself in (and by) his house. And just as Hoeller’s wife submits to Hoeller, and the children submit to their father, without ever for a moment giving themselves up, as I thought, they subordinate themselves to the house, without giving themselves up. The Hoeller house corresponds to Hoeller, and he and all its other inhabitants conduct themselves in it, in his house, accordingly. And where, I asked myself, did Hoeller get the idea for this house of his, because I am fully aware that I got my idea, to build the Cone for my sister, from Hoeller and his house at the Aurach gorge. But I haven’t asked him to this day where he got the idea for building his house, though he naturally must have gotten the idea from a house that another man built for himself (or for someone else) before, probably a house standing nearby, for Hoeller hasn’t gotten around too much. Possibly Hoeller doesn’t even know where he got the idea for building his house and for building it as he ended up building it, a house so much in accordance with himself, so visibly in accordance with himself, as I’ve never seen another. I’ll ask him where he got the idea, I thought, and I asked Hoeller where he’d gotten his idea, because I simply had to know, while I looked over and studied and explored his house, it was indispensable to me to know. But Hoeller can’t remember where he got the idea to build his house. The chances are that the house that gave Hoeller the idea to build his own house is standing quite close by, I thought, as close as can be to the Hoeller house.

Yet there’s no other house to compare with it, I thought, so Roithamer. It’s also possible that Hoeller never saw the model for his house in reality, for in reality there isn’t any model for Hoeller’s house in the vicinity, I thought, so Roithamer, it must have come to him in a dream. In that case it’s quite likely, I thought, that Hoeller didn’t see a model for his house in a dream, but that he dreamed the house itself. All he had to do was trust his dream and accurately copy the house he saw in his dream, so Roithamer. Since he’s a master of the craft and in addition drew on all sorts of books, as I know, including the kind of books I myself got hold of for my own purposes, for the rest of building knowledge he needed, it was only a question of willpower and endurance for Hoeller to be able to build his house. That he chose, of all places, the Aurach gorge for the site wasn’t a matter of low cost, on the contrary, the costs of the site here at the Aurach gorge were, as I know, exceptionally high, it just happens to be characteristic of Hoeller. Just as it’s characteristic of me to build the Cone for my sister in the middle of the Kobernausser forest. The monstrousness of realizing my plan is clear to me, I said to myself, after the monstrousness of Hoeller’s plan to build his house had become clear to me, but the actual monstrousness of it then turned out to be much more monstrous than I could ever have imagined. But it’s the same monstrousness for me to build and to realize and to complete the Cone as it is for Hoeller to build and realize and complete the Hoeller house, so Roithamer, everything regarding his house, the Hoeller house, I thought, so Roithamer, is as much in accordance with his nature as everything regarding the Cone for my sister is in accordance with mine. And because I always felt at home with Hoeller, I also felt at home with the house he had built (for himself and his family), everything in this house is home to me, I thought, and I went on the one hand from top to bottom in the house, and on the other hand from bottom to top, closely examining everything in my scientific way and checking out everything, but I could see that the inside of the house as well as the outside of the house at the Aurach gorge, that, in short, the entire Hoeller house was already familiar to me, one hundred percent familiar, I said to myself. And so I thought that everything in the Cone that was to be built and to be realized must also be familiar to me, one hundred percent familiar or at least almost one hundred percent familiar, because my sister, for whom I wanted to build the Cone, wanted to at first, but then most decidedly and most determinedly had to build for her, “had to” underlined, one hundred percent familiar. Once I have fully grasped my sister’s nature with my intelligence, on the one hand, and on the other hand with my emotional awareness, then I can begin building the Cone, so Roithamer. As for me, I wonder why Hoeller has lodged me in this garret which, as I now see, really belonged so entirely to Roithamer, surely not only because I was Roithamer’s closest intimate and because I told Hoeller that I was now going to work on Roithamer’s literary legacy, but only in Hoeller’s garret, probably because it seemed the most natural thing in the world to him, Hoeller, that I wanted to domicile myself in Hoeller’s garret in order to sift and sort Roithamer’s papers there. I told Hoeller that his garret was so full of Roithamer’s living spirit that there could be no better place for working on Roithamer’s papers than Hoeller’s garret which is simply one hundred percent conducive to working on Roithamer’s legacy, besides which it also afforded me the opportunity to study the contents of the books and articles Roithamer had accumulated in Hoeller’s garret, primarily for his cone-building project, all of which had a bearing on Roithamer’s legacy, what he had read must be integrated with what he had ultimately written, the one must be brought into relationship with the other and everything put together had to be brought into relationship with Roithamer, by me. Everything in Hoeller’s garret belonging to Roithamer and left by Roithamer for my work on Roithamer’s papers, was in exactly the state in which Roithamer had left it just before his suicide, Hoeller told me, nothing had been touched by anyone else since Roithamer left Hoeller’s garret, he, Hoeller, was the only person who ever set foot in the garret, he allowed no one inside, not even his wife or his kids, who were always asking, out of curiosity, to be allowed in Hoeller’s garret, which had basically already become Roithamer’s garret, but their father, Hoeller, had always forbidden them to enter it. The Cone, I’d said to Hoeller on my arrival, was unique not only in Europe, it was unique in all the world, never before had any man yet built such a cone, in the course of centuries, in the course of the entire history of building, frequent attempts had been made to build a cone as a habitation, a pure conical shape as a live-in object, I’d said to Hoeller, but no one ever succeeded, not in France, not in Russia, as Roithamer wrote, “not in France, not in Russia” underlined. He, Roithamer, had had to move into Hoeller’s garret in order to be able to build the Cone, he had made Hoeller’s garret his construction studio for building the Cone,

“‘construction studio for building the Cone” underlined, because a splendid thing can come only out of another splendid thing, in this case, the Cone out of Hoeller’s house. Basically, “basically” underlined, there had never been any problem for Roithamer and Hoeller in understanding each other. Must try to describe mother, the Eferding woman, so Roithamer, compared with my sister: First, personal characteristics. Actual y I tried several times to be with my mother in Altensam, just as she probably tried being with me, but these efforts were always doomed at the outset, they never got beyond being mere useless tries equally destructive to the sanity of either of us, they only turned against us and ended by destroying and finally annihilating everything inside us. Actually she always loathed being with me and vice versa; as far as I was concerned, obsessed as I was with my work and my passion for my work only, nothing else, for in fact everything always was my work, “everything”

underlined, mother simply always tried, simply because she is my mother, not that she went out of her way for me, but she did try, just as I didn’t exactly go out of my way for her, but I did try, but these efforts were always instantly recognizable as mere damnable efforts for the sake of doing the right thing, “doing the right thing” underlined, because what she instinctively hated was never hateful to me, what pleased her displeased me, what pricked her interest had never pricked mine, where she was sensitive I was never sensitive, andsoforth, so Roithamer, the Eferding woman was instinctively the kind who’d repel me and who was bound to destroy Altensam, or at least she was instinctively the kind who was bound to hasten the process whereby Altensam must be destroyed and annihilated, such persons or characters suddenly turn up, like my mother, that Eferding woman from Eferding, they suddenly spring from their family origins into the world of others to destroy it and to annihilate it, no matter whether they realize this or not, the Eferding woman realized it perfectly. This attempt as a description or this description as an attempt, with all the imperfection, uncertainty, which characterizes all of these attempts or descriptions or descriptive efforts, fragmentary stabs at deviations in Altensam andsoforth, such as I’ve always made in order to understand Altensam, this particular attempt made only because I’ve heard about that so-called Mother’s Day, that’s a cue-word, Mother’s Day, started me off on this note. How, from my point of view, she was always bound to fail even in the most trifling of trifles, so-called irrelevancies, the disciplines and arrangements that had always been the disciplines and arrangements at Altensam, anyway she had no access whatsoever to the so called intellectual sphere, nor did she ever try to understand something she was bound to disdain, to hate, even just something, no matter what, of those things that concerned me and for which I dared to exist all my life, the things that had to be the actual meaning of my life and my existence, she pretended to understand but she understood nothing, though of course I too very often pretended to understand, in conversation with her, her concerns, without feeling in the least inclined to such an understanding or even able to understand, because I didn’t even want to have such an inclination to understand her, she understood, she often said, and understood nothing, when she said she did she was putting on an act, just as I was always putting on an act about all of her concerns, if only to endure long stretches of Altensam at all in her presence, for it was extremely hard for me even to exist side by side with the Eferding woman, even if I didn’t see her, as long as I knew for a fact she was there, she went so against my grain, all these efforts always because I still went on regarding Altensam as my home, even throughout all my time in England, but home is always and in every case a mistake, so Roithamer, “in every case”

underlined. When the Eferding woman said that she understood she was putting on an act and this act was instantly recognizable as such, she was all emotion, and since I never wanted to have anything to do with people who exist and act only on an emotional basis, the so-called world of the emotions had always been suspect and always hateful to me, people like the Eferding woman, my mother, constantly pretended to understand but they only have a certain feeling without intelligence, which is repulsive to the other kind, my kind, of person, and even this unintelligent feeling of theirs is a fake, not a reality, this type of female has only a dim perception of emotion, and not even a dim perception of intelligence, so that actually they have neither intelligence nor feeling, and the act they put on of having feeling and intelligence is nothing more than sexual hypocrisy, “sexual hypocrisy” underlined.

Although she tried, in the beginning, to draw me into her emotional world, to push me out of my own world which was in opposition to this emotional world of hers, kept trying to urge me out of my own world into hers, she no longer tried to do that later on, because I gave her no opportunity to try it, but her effort in that direction had lasted a long time, her effort to drive me out of my own world into hers, while my effort to acquaint her with my interests, I don’t say familiarize her, that would have been a totally hopeless undertaking, her tricks with which she worked at alienating me from myself and eventually also from my father were so complicated, so cunning, she kept on trying it with every possible and impossible kind of finesse, she thought she could deceive me with her simple, yet common, blunt, Eferding household intelligence which in any case always lapsed into rudeness, and had nothing to do with real intelligence, she thought she could manipulate me to suit her purposes, suggesting that it would be better, smarter for me to obey her, not my father, I’d see that soon enough andsoforth, but she always had to recognize that her efforts had been in vain, so Roithamer. Her vulgarity, in no way differentiated from the vulgarity of all her gender, became in her later years an open disgust with everything connected with me, so Roithamer. It was never in all her life possible for her to change, she simply lacked the will and the instinct and the taste required, and for me to meet her halfway, “her” underlined, would have meant the sacrifice of everything I am, so Roithamer. While in England I’d always expected to recover in Altensam, so during my first hours in Altensam, situated as it is in such peculiar and basically unfavorable climatic conditions, requiring all by themselves the supreme effort of willpower just to survive, in those first hours and days, which should have served for my recovery and relaxation after the long strain in England, I’d usually offered her virtually no resistance, I always started by sucking in Altensam just as it was, exposing myself to it willingly, but my resistance soon became most adamant, because she’d actually been irritating me without respite, after only two or three days I had to admit to myself that I could not recover and relax in Altensam, that I had merely fallen victim once again to the delusion that I could recover and relax in Altensam even though I had fallen victim to this delusion hundreds and thousands of times before, a delusion in which I lived in England, at Cambridge, that I could safely strain myself there to the utmost in my mental labors, because I’d be able to recover and relax in Altensam from these mental labors, so I kept going back to Altensam, probably only from sheer habit by this time, no longer with the least expectation of being understood, only from habit, not in the certainty that Altensam would fulfill my wish and my need, namely, to recover and relax, quite the contrary, my visits in Altensam, those terrible visits-from-habit, were clearly from the first destined not to bring me recovery and relaxation in Altensam, they could only upset me and make me sick and drive me crazy owing to those conditions basically the fault of my mother, the Eferding woman, so that as soon as I got there I was immediately entangled in all these quarrels and socalled power struggles in Altensam, things I basically wanted to have nothing to do with, actually it was always the Eferding woman, my mother, who’d been the cause of that sense of impending complications, as soon as I’d arrived, which immediately turned into intimations of catastrophe, but very often, though in fact this too emanated from her, I myself was, as for instance in the case of the color job on the farm building, the one who instigated or sparked off such quarrels and catastrophic moods, which always and in every case turned out to be pointless. Although for the first few moments, I must say, we were most considerate toward one another, after the first few moments we were again totally ruthless against each other, it was only a matter of time as to when we would separate, how soon I’d leave Altensam where I’d only just arrived, our mutual consideration had always lasted only through the first few minutes, then our real feelings, nothing but real dislike, even hatred, ran free again. Yet our efforts at restraint during those first few moments were interesting even so, because both of us had made them again and again, and so often, despite our awareness that they were doomed to failure in no time at all, even before I’d had a chance to hang up my coat, to take my bag to my room, even before I’d had a look around Altensam, I hadn’t even got beyond the outer hall, because it was clear to both of us that we stay the same and have stayed the same between times, that we haven’t changed, that she, the Eferding woman, hasn’t changed in Altensam nor I in England, and the mere idea or any conceivable attempt based on such an idea that we must try to change for each other’s sake was nothing but madness, presumption, megalomania, where change was so impossible there was nothing for us to change, because we simply had no way to do it, neither of us was born with the capacity to change ourselves, on the contrary, when we’d tried to change, despite our full awareness that we couldn’t change, and when we’d failed again, as we both felt in our bones we would after the first few minutes, after the first words of greeting had been exchanged, though even those had already been uttered in that tone which indicated that we were losing again, because we’d already lost at the moment we’d come face to face, our effort to change had simply made matters worse. At first we’d always look at each other as if we’d changed, because we thought the interim might have changed us, but the interim all by itself had never changed us, I remained myself, she remained herself, we made believe that the interim had transformed us into people other than those we were before the interim, I’d persuaded myself that I’d turned from an unbearable (to her) man into a bearable (to her) man, just as she’d persuaded herself that in the interim she’d become bearable (to me), though she’d always previously been unbearable (to me), we’d also imagined that we’d made certain efforts to improve, though we could no longer think what efforts, we’d only, as we remembered it, considered making efforts in our minds, but in reality we’d made no efforts at all, we’d never translated our thoughts about efforts into any real efforts, we never could, because if we could have we’d at least have made an acceptable person out of ourselves (for the other one) in the interim, which was, after all, a most eventful interim for the most part, an interim certainly full of the most enormous changes in Altensam (owing to her) as in England (owing to me), but these changes had occurred only outside of ourselves, not within us, we had remained as and what we were prior to each interim, our characters, as we could clearly determine at our very first contact, had not only not changed, they had, on the contrary, only hardened, which made our pretense of mutual understanding only all the more ridiculous. She didn’t stand a chance of winning me over, any more than I stood a chance of winning her over, because she was always predisposed against all I was, and owing to this predisposition her character had kept pathologically hardening in the mold of her own tendencies, whether we wished it or not, it no longer mattered, we were going to be for the rest of our lives against each other, she against me and I against her, I’d be focused entirely on myself, she entirely on herself, concerned with our own interests and totally monopolized by these interests, we’d just play a polite charade with each other for hours, for days, for weeks, until all our differences, all the barriers between us, had come again quite visibly into the open between us, until Altensam, whatever it had become through the Eferding woman, however this mechanism of destruction came into motion again because of our mutual dislike, repudiation, this mutual hatred of ours, moving always not only to disturb us but to destroy us, so Roithamer, where everything repelled me as far as she was concerned and repelled her as far as I was concerned. Nevertheless both of us were always incapable of simply giving up seeing each other ever again, she’d write, inviting me home, to England, and I came from England to Altensam, as if something had changed, each time we’d said good-bye we did it in the expectation of never seeing each other again, of parting forever, because there was simply absolutely nothing uniting us, we had not a scintilla in common, except for disgust and dislike, nothing, yet we were not only unable to stick to our decision never to see one another again, but the intervals between trips from England to Austria, to Altensam, had actually become increasingly shorter in the last few years. And the ordeals to which we subjected each other, once I was back in Altensam, kept getting worse, in fact they were getting to be terrible ordeals because we had reached a high degree of natural ease in the art of tormenting ourselves, our mutual hatred went even deeper than that, and everything indicated the possibility of an even greater deepening of that hatred, our methods became more sophisticated with every one of my visits to Altensam. Still, it’s unimaginable, so Roithamer, with what a degree of mindlessness persons like the Eferding woman seem to be capable of existing, with what emotional callousness, considering that emotion and nothing else is all she has, her entire being set against everything, and takes the most antagonistic action every time. At first it was still possible for me to think that a certain shyness with regard to the life of the mind, to what is regarded as, after all, male intellectuality, had turned, in her, to outright disgust with everything intellectual, so Roithamer, but as time went on, and time had indeed accelerated the process once she indubitably had the upper hand in Altensam, her hatred had grown to the point that she had to hate not only paper covered with my script but every piece of paper, every kind of paper, she regarded paper as a foundation for mental activity, instantly aroused her hatred, it was as though her hatred of paper alone was enough to reduce her to total exhaustion every day, I often thought, pencils, pens, aroused an unimaginable hatred in her, not even to mention books, pamphlets, periodicals, she even hated newspapers, because newspapers were also printed papers which made them supremely dangerous and they were above all, as she thought, aimed at her, she’d hated papers all her life and had turned this hatred of papers, of all the papers in the world, into an actually boundless hatred of everything around her which was connected with these papers, and she’d been driven by this hatred all her life as by a mortal disease, or rather by her own, “her” underlined, mortal disease, on the other hand, as regards myself, I always had the feeling that I was lying in ambush for her, that I was setting her a trap, that I’d often given her cause to remember her hatred as a mortal disease and to show this hatred openly, that I set her so-called paper traps to catch her out in her hatred of paper, so that I could watch her open outburst of hatred, paper hatred, with malicious satisfaction, because there can be no doubt, so Roithamer, that I did take a malicious satisfaction in her hatred and all her extreme carryings-on, because her hatred was so extreme, her ways in general were so extreme, actually I’d let less than a couple of minutes pass before I started to criticize her, or at least looked her over critically, in other words, the moment I turned up in Altensam, and I always turned up abruptly, I’d already set her a trap, and when she fell into my trap, I criticized her for falling into my trap, I always lay in ambush to catch her in one or another of her repulsively feminine ways and then took her to task, not even two minutes went by after I’d arrived at Altensam before I’d picked on some trifle to criticize her for, because basically I disliked everything about her, or rather, because everything about her was nothing but repugnant to me, no matter what she basically did or didn’t do, whatever it was, I found it repugnant, no matter what she wore, for instance, I found it repugnant, whatever she said, whatever she thought, it was never anything but repugnant, that’s the truth, so Roithamer, to keep such facts to myself wouldn’t make sense, so I won’t keep these facts to myself, because these are facts that certainly characterize the Eferding woman and me, “certainly the Eferding woman and me” underlined. So I naturally always wondered how it could be possible for two people, who were in addition mother and son, not mother’s son but father’s son, leaving this out of account, however, how is it possible that these two people, who keep on tormenting each other constantly, with a truly unexampled ruthlessness, who feel compelled to torment each other to the very edge of madness, who do it every time and always do it again, and who keep hating each other more deeply and more ruthlessly, nevertheless go on seeing each other again and again? But the chances are that it was precisely these possibilities of mutual tormentings, this mutual hatred, this mutual readiness to be tormented, that kept drawing me again and again from England to Altensam, so Roithamer. Probably, so Roithamer, because I needed everything my mother, the Eferding woman, had in these last years turned into a horrible Altensam. And I did after all leave Altensam again at once each time, and took refuge, as I had every chance to do, in Hoeller’s garret, which began by being a books-refuge, a socalled books-and-papers refuge, for I had squirreled away in Hoeller’s garret every conceivable book and paper I could lay hands on and that could be of use to me, as well as all the books and papers I could do without, and I’d torn the pages I most valued out of these essential books and papers and tacked them on the walls of Hoeller’s garret, pages of Pascal, for instance, again and again, much of Montaigne, very many pages of Pushkin and Schopenhauer, of Novalis and Dostoyevsky, I’d tacked almost all the pages of Valéry’s M. Teste on the walls before I’d covered the walls of Hoeller’s garret with my plans and sketches for building the Cone; to gain perspective I’ve always pasted or tacked all the papers important to me on my walls, even as a child I’d covered the walls of my room in Altensam with other people’s most important (to me) ideas, pasted or tacked on, so I’d first covered the walls of Hoeller’s garret with the most important sayings of Pascal and Novalis and Montaigne, before I’d tacked them up and pasted them up with my sketches and anyway all kinds of ideas for building the Cone, and so I always could immediately clear out of Altensam and move into Hoeller’s garret and find refuge in Hoeller’s garret in those thoughts on the walls of Hoeller’s garret, the fact that it is possible for me to go to Hoeller’s garret where I always found everything I needed for my thoughts and reflections, all those thoughts of other men and through them, also all my own thoughts, every time, made it possible for me to leave Altensam without going to pieces, so Roithamer, the minute I’d arrived in Altensam I thought of nothing else but getting away from Altensam, because being with the Eferding woman was unbearable to me from the first moment, and so I went to Hoeller’s garret, quite often taking the detour over Stocket into Hoeller’s garret, so Roithamer. Little by little I had stowed away all the books and papers I’d had in Altensam up in Hoeller’s garret, where they’d really be safe, for they were no longer safe in Altensam, all these exceptionally useful books and papers, not to say that they were probably indispensable to my life, I lived in constant fear that mother, the Eferding woman, would one day use all these books of mine as firewood, that she would stage a great bonfire of all my papers before all eyes, that is, before the eyes of my father and my brothers and my sister, one day, this was what I’d always feared, after all, but she had never done it, though my fear was justified, or else she hadn’t got around to it before I’d moved all my books and papers to safety in Hoeller’s garret, there, in Hoeller’s garret, I always thought in England, those books and papers are safe, now I needn’t worry from one minute to the next that they might be destroyed by my mother, the Eferding woman, Hoeller’s garret is where all these books and papers of mine belong, not in Altensam, where the atmosphere is antagonistic to them. And so the thought that I’d carried these books and papers of mine, not many but all the most important of them, to safety in Hoeller’s garret from my room in Altensam, while I was in England or wherever I was far away from Altensam, was always a good, reassuring thought. That my mother is capable of burning or otherwise destroying my books and papers, which I’d read and studied and worked through afresh again and again, that she is capable of suddenly destroying them, or of simply withholding them from me, specifically during my absence in England or elsewhere, has always been clear to me. While my mother and I had always tried, so Roithamer, during the first few minutes of my arrival in Altensam, to get along with each other, and had done all we could, even though it went against the grain, to make it work, we soon ended up doing it all only as. proof that we simply could not get along with each other, and so we had a chaotic situation, a situation no one could be expected to stand, we simply made existence a torment for each other, perhaps this had simply become a habit because by now we’d been together against our will too often, so the habit of mutual torture came to play the largest role in our encounters, but it was always, as I thought, she who took the initiative in tormenting me, even though I was the one who kept coming back to Altensam because I couldn’t stand it in England after a while of trying to adjust to it, and so I always showed up at home again, just as if it were somehow possible for me, as it simply no longer was or never had been, to spend any time at all with my mother. As regards any kind of intellectual interests, she could only pretend to them, in which respect she differed in no way from the rest of her sex, in fact I’d say that everything in and about her was nothing but pretense, but then our whole era is antiintellectual at heart, it only pretends to be interested in intellectual matters, these days the trend is all against intellect and for hypocrisy, it’s all an era of hypocritical pretense, hypocrisy everywhere, nothing real left, it’s all hypocrisy. She hated my sister, so the Eferding woman hated what she called my doting talk about my sister, in fact I was always instinctively moved to speak of the sister I loved more than anything in the world, it’s true that I was almost constantly intent upon studying my sister’s personality, while at the same time I kept loving her and having to show my love for her quite openly and in fact I did show it at all times, most of all probably because I hated my mother, the Eferding woman, I compulsively made her witness my love and tender concern for my sister, the studied care which I lavished on he even in my thoughts, especially the care and delicacy with which I made every effort to treat her when we met, without actually having to make an effort because care and timidity came quite naturally to me with regard to my sister, all this was naturally hateful to the Eferding woman, everything I had noticed about my sister in the course of my life that had made her more and more the peculiarly lovable person that my sister always was for me, more and more endeared her to me and ended by making her a sort of second and superior self, in the way I saw her and felt about her, it all acutely distressed the Eferding woman, at first she had always tried to draw me over to her side by means of her so-called pretended sympathy for my sister, whom she knew to be no more her partisan than I was, my sister naturally was of my father’s party all her life, and like myself, though most of the time secretly she was happy in her loyalty to him, but the Eferding woman tried to win me over by her so-called hypocritical sympathy for my sister, but precisely because the sympathy she offered, which always turned out to be hypocritical anyway, was repellent to me, her efforts always ended up by repelling me. My sister always had innate good taste, good taste inherited from my father, while my mother, that is to say, her mother and mine, was totally deficient in taste or tact, she had never known how to please people in a friendly and natural way, while my sister always had the gift of pleasing through her friendliness and naturalness, so Roithamer, our mother suffered from this defect and whenever she’d suffered from it for any length of time she’d always go to Eferding, to her father’s house, the butcher’s house, for sanctuary, but of course she’d only come back, after some days or weeks, back to Altensam, with even less sympathetic understanding for Altensam than before, and even less understanding for us. But my brothers never sensed any of this, since they were of the same mind as the Eferding woman, who had been able to endure life in Altensam at all only because her own children, our brothers that is, I am safe in saying that my sister and I did not consider ourselves her children but only our father’s children, but our brothers were on her side, they felt deeply akin to her family, our brothers had often gone with her to Eferding and felt at home there as nowhere else, while for me Eferding had always been an imposition, mentally and emotionally, and I’d gone there only a few times, when I was forced to go, on quite ordinary occasions, weddings of my mother’s relatives, their funerals, or perhaps to stock my mother’s larder with meat out of her father’s butcher shop during the war, but that always involved sending the Altensam cattle down to Eferding, where they’d be butchered in my maternal grandfather’s butcher shop, then dressed, and then we brought back the meat butchered and dressed in Eferding, up to Altensam. Our mother hadn’t wanted to adapt herself to Altensam, which would have been the most natural thing, but she had tried to adapt us to Eferding, “us” underlined, in which she of course did not succeed, under all the prevailing conditions at Altensam, the fact being that our father was always a quite original character, just as Altensam was altogether original by nature, though I must admit that this entire situation must be considered an extraordinary one. I can only say that she hated everything as she hated herself, because, once she was in Altensam, she had to hate everything and therefore also herself. But it would be overhasty to describe her only as an unhappy person, “overhasty” underlined. She hated everything and everyone and in this pathological process she was as if arrested by an incurable paroxysm against everything, of course she was an unhappy person, she was not alone in this unhappiness but rather in the company of almost all human beings who’ve never for a moment tried to understand the causes of their unhappiness, who constantly blame particularly the people closest to them for their own unhappiness, and never once seek a single cause of their unhappiness in themselves, she had never worked on herself, even though she was always full of doubts about herself, but not in a way that would have forced her to dig for causes, she had buried herself steadily deeper into her eventually hopeless life against Altensam, just as my brothers buried themselves in their hopeless life against Altensam, isolated themselves, for undoubtedly my brothers, siding with the Eferding woman, had also isolated themselves, they’d actually in time worked their way entirely out of Altensam, because they’d basically always worked with my mother against Altensam. In Altensam, ever more deeply buried in isolation in Altensam, while at the same time working their way out of Altensam, so Roithamer, “at the same time . . . out of Altensam” underlined. It’s a logical consequence that now, after they’d always worked against Altensam, after their mother’s death, after the death of the Eferding woman, they will have to leave Altensam; by my selling Altensam this process is rounding itself off, so Roithamer. My brothers were also Eferding people, so Roithamer, and there have always been two parties living against each other and existing ever more intensively because of their mutual opposition while always trying to liquidate this in the opposing party, the Eferding party on the one hand, viz. my mother and my brothers, and on the other hand the Altensam party, that is my father, my sister, and me. Because of her ultimately misanthropic nature and her environment- and self-destructive spirit, which was an Eferding spirit, her face had in time become a misanthropic and self-destructive face and every morning upon awakening she already entered, almost in panic, into her misanthropy and self-destruction as facial destruction, as if into an incurable malignant disease, and with all these malignant, pathologically malignant facial features she encountered us early in the morning over breakfast. Mistrustfully or at least with a most insulting reserve she met each and all of those whom she associated with Altensam, all persons who came to Altensam and had been instantly classified by her as belonging to Altensam; she thought she had a right to hate people because she thought everybody hated her, so Roithamer. Not one, not one single hour of my life have I spent in harmony alone with my mother, “in harmony” underlined, so Roithamer. And so it wasn’t easy, either, to go out and meet people with her, because she could meet all these people only with mistrust and rejection, because these people all tended to belong to Altensam, and Eferding was far away, so Roithamer. As a child I’d hardly met people with her, no matter whether in Stocket or in another of the villages below Altensam, when these people, no matter what they were like, were irritated by her, they’d instantly noticed that something was going on here against them, whether they were conscious of this peculiarity or not, they usually took their leave of us at once. She mastered the art of separating me from people I valued, it wasn’t long before hardly anyone came up to Altensam to see me, and I soon had very few friends left, so-called playmates, in my childhood, friends from Stocket for instance, once she noticed a spiritual kinship to Altensam in them, she was against them, so Roithamer. Because she had determined to exploit Altensam for her own purposes, such as, for instance, to take possession of me, simply to take possession of Altensam, she naturally always ran into opposition at Altensam, just as my brothers, the Eferdingers, had always run into opposition. Whenever I showed my sister an article that was bound to interest her, so Roithamer, my sister was always most charmingly, “most charmingly” underlined, ready to discuss the contents of that article with me, to try to understand the contents of the article and then the reasons for the article, along with me, precisely what I’d found stimulating in that article was what she’d also found stimulating, I had told her what it was that particularly interested me in that article, what particularly attracted me, for instance, what was true or false in it, and we’d always noted a particularly deep accord in our shared view of the various subjects of whatever kind, my sister was always interested in hearing my opinion, just as she’d always been able to listen, unlike our mother, who could never listen, just as I was always interested in hearing my sister’s opinion (on this or that subject). But my (and my sister’s) mother had always shown a lack of interest in everything that interested and concerned us, no matter in what sense. All her life she had always reacted to us with a total lack of interest, so Roithamer, “total lack of interest” underlined. Just as my sister always took an interest in my own scientific work, any of my intellectual work, it was more than an interest, actually, in what I was thinking and writing, my inventions and fantasies, so I took more than an interest in all of my sister’s artistic inventions, and in everything she thought, but most of all in her miniature painting, in which she quickly achieved great mastery, her miniatures, painted on enamel and porcelain, are the most beautiful imaginable, between me and my sister there’s always been the greatest and most loving sympathy, she, my sister, had always entered wholly into anything concerning me, as I always wholly entered into whatever concerned her. For days on end we’d amuse ourselves talking about a book we’d read one after the other, exchanging ideas about this book until we could sum up all these ideas in a single idea which precisely characterized that book, or else a work of art, a painting, for days on end we could discuss and debate a certain formulation we had read somewhere, for the two of us our reading was always the most important subject, without reading neither my sister nor I could have stood life for any length of time, not that we had been brought up to read, quite the opposite was the case, as already described, but in the course of time we had managed to acquire our passion for reading, our delight in books, the pleasures of experience by way of reading, the intellectual discipline connected with reading, while pacing the floor together in my room or in hers, we could talk about every kind of thing we’d read or heard or observed or about every kind of discovery we’d made, each on his own, we talked it all out, quite in contrast to our mother, the Eferding woman, with whom all of that would never have been possible.

Undisturbed we spent entire nights together up in the attic, considering and concerning ourselves with books we’d just been reading, studying, without noticing that daylight had broken already, because our discussions had always been full of the greatest intensity, yet also the greatest possible serenity. Our favorite place for these talks, critical reflections, suppositions, andsoforth, was always the attic, though very often, in summer, also the area behind the farm building from which you could see down country all the way to Stocket. Very often, too, we’d walk through the park, quite casually in every way, finding its neglected state more and more of a stimulus to conversation, because the park at Altensam was all the more beautiful for having been left to run wild, overgrown with weeds, and hence all the more conducive to our rambles back and forth. From a certain, no longer exactly identifiable point on, what I most enjoyed was to withdraw into my reading, my scientific, natural science, a kind of reading which my mother most particularly loathed my doing, just as she, the Eferding woman, also secretly hated my sister’s work, her miniature painting, though she didn’t dare hate it openly, for what and how my sister painted could not but please even my mother, and in contrast to my scribbling it wasn’t dangerous, either, but she could not quite suppress her dislike of everything that’s Altensam even in this respect. Actually I asked myself over and over again why I didn’t break off contact with my mother, simply stopped going to see her, but then I’d have had to stop going to see Altensam and after all I was attached to Altensam, just as I kept on feeling attached to my childhood, be it how it may have been, Altensam was my childhood and childhood is in every case an obstacle to making a final break, “final break” underlined. That woman, I keep thinking, so Roithamer, who hated my sister because I loved her and vice versa and who basically also hated our father because he couldn’t hate us, so Roithamer. How those two could keep on living together, I asked myself, my father and mother, I don’t know, I can only suppose that they’ve always lived with extremest difficulty. The question is, however, how these two could have joined together, married each other, when they had absolutely nothing in common, never anything in common, the whole thing goes back only to the unlucky circumstance that my father stayed the night in the Eferding hostelry, which happened to be my mother’s home, so Roithamer. My father simply must have totally lost his head, “lost his head” underlined. There was absolutely nothing to justify such a union at all. We always wonder, when we see two people together, particularly when they’re actually married, how these two people could have arrived at such a decision, such an act, so we tell ourselves that it’s a matter of human nature, that it’s very often a case of two people going together, getting together, only in order to kill themselves in time, sooner or later to kill themselves, after mutually tormenting each other for years or for decades, only to end up killing themselves anyway, people who get together even though they probably clearly perceive their future of shared torment, who join together, get married, in the teeth of all reason, who against all reason commit the natural crime of bringing children into the world who then proceed to be the unhappiest imaginable people, we have evidence of this situation wherever we look, so Roithamer. People who get together and marry even though they can foresee their future together only as a lifelong shared martyrdom, suddenly all these people qua human beings, human beings qua ordinary people, so Roithamer, enter into a union, into a marriage, into their annihilation, step by step down they go into the most horrible situation imaginable, annihilation by marriage, meaning annihilation mental, emotional, and physical, as we can see all around us, the whole world is full of instances confirming this, so Roithamer, why, I may well ask myself, this senseless sealing of that bargain, we wonder about it because we have an instance of it before us, how did this instance come to be? that this highly intelligent, extraordinary, exceptional man could attract and marry this utterly common and ordinary, even thoroughly vulgar person and could even go on to make children with this person, it’s nature, we say, it’s always nature, every time, that nature which remains incomprehensible to us and unknowable as long as we live, that nature in which everything is rational and yet reason has nothing whatever to do with it, so Roithamer. At first we hear nothing unusual from all these people, if we do hear something about them, and then we hear only revolting things, only revolting things, so Roithamer, “only revolting things” underlined, just as, in our own case, we see nothing unusual in our parents at first, but later we see only revolting things. Nature is that incomprehensible force that brings people together, forcibly pushes them together, by every means, so that these people will destroy themselves, annihilate, kill, ruin, extinguish themselves, so Roithamer. Then they throw themselves down a rock cleft, or off a bridge railing, or they shoot themselves, like my uncle, or they hang themselves, like my other uncle, or they throw themselves in front of a train, like my third uncle, so Roithamer. We ourselves are the most suicide prone, so Roithamer, “prone” underlined. And didn’t our cousin, the only son of our third uncle, kill himself too, after he got married to a doctor’s daughter from Kirchdorf on the Krems, a marriage that simply couldn’t have worked out, so Roithamer, that handsome man, so Roithamer, “handsome man” underlined, who threw himself into a cleft in the rock in the Tennen Mountains, over a thousand meters down into a dark cleft in the rock. Because I wanted to see how deep that cleft in the rock was, I once made a detour on my way home from England to Altensam to this rock cleft in the Tennen Mountains, I went climbing up those high mountains in a constant and worsening state of vertiginous nausea, putting the utmost strain on my physical resources as I’m not cut out by nature for climbing high mountains, and I actually made it to that cleft in the rock and I looked down into that cleft because I couldn’t believe that so deep a cleft in the rock could exist, but that cleft is even much deeper; so it was here, into this very cleft in the rock that my cousin threw himself, I thought, standing at its rim and looking down into its depths and for a moment I was tempted to throw myself into that cleft too, but suddenly, when this idea was at its most compelling, this idea seemed ridiculous to me, and I took myself out of there. I know how much I hate the high mountain country, but my curiosity to see that deep cleft in the rock, of which I’d only heard up to that point and the depth of which I couldn’t believe, drove me to climb up all the way to that cleft. But it takes a great sense of life, in fact it takes the greatest will to live and to exist, not to throw oneself down such a cleft when one is actually standing at its rim. But I didn’t throw myself down that cleft. He, my cousin, had thrown himself down into it, why into this particular cleft I don’t know, I certainly don’t, so Roithamer,

“I certainly don’t” underlined. They’d found his shoes at the rim, his jacket too, six months after they noticed that he was gone, his young wife hadn’t missed him until then, from the fact that his shoes and his jacket were found on the rim of that cleft in the rock they deduced that he had thrown himself down the cleft, but there’s no real proof, these clues, yes, but no proof at all, because nobody can get down into the bottom of that cleft. Many people had supposed he’d gone abroad, but then some mountain climbers found his shoes and his jacket at the rim of the cleft, so he must have, I suppose, taken off his shoes and his jacket before he threw himself down into that rock cleft, he didn’t want to throw himself into that rock cleft in his jacket and shoes, so Roithamer. Another of those lonely men, underlined, acquiring a wife at the unhappiest time of his life, a wife who brought him to the point where he threw himself down that rock cleft. The inclination to suicide as a character trait as in the character of my cousin who finally threw himself into that rock cleft, a specific kind of suicide, first climbing up those high mountains, just to throw himself into the depths of that rock cleft, so Roithamer. Because he spoke of it so often and with such passion and such scientific precision at the same time, they no longer believed that he would actually commit suicide, for anyone who talks about it as much as our cousin did, as incidentally the others did too, his father for instance always talked about suicide and kept bringing it up and every time in a better organized frame of mind, such a man, they think, won’t really commit suicide, on the contrary, such a man keeps clarifying the idea of suicide in his head and as a result he doesn’t commit suicide, having this clarification in his head and being constantly capable of analyzing this clarification, he simply can’t commit suicide anymore, because he has this constant clear understanding of suicide, so Roithamer, to act out in reality something he’d always been talking about and which must basically always be repellent to him, he simply couldn’t do it, every possible argument, every possible reason, every possible negation could lead to anything, usually to a mortal disease, but not to suicide, so Roithamer, because ultimately everything inside such a head is against self-destruction, and ‘ yet it’s remarkable how regularly such a man will talk about suicide and about self-destruction, the subject gave him no peace, it tended to warp his reason, which he then proceeded to restore again, and yet one couldn’t help being struck, so Roithamer, by the way our cousin kept talking almost incessantly about suicide after his marriage to the doctor’s daughter from Kirchdorf, but nobody took him seriously, so Roithamer, nobody had the slightest apprehension that he would actually commit suicide, because he was constantly talking about suicide as if he were talking about a subject he entirely understood, though it did remain fascinating to him, just as though he were talking about some work of art, with the most scientific detachment. And anyone who talks so scientifically about suicide, as though it were a work of art, talks about it with a clear precision that humbles the rest of us, why, such a person simply doesn’t commit suicide. Not until he nevertheless did commit suicide, of course, throwing himself down that fissure in the rock, so Roithamer. But to return to my subject, I was speaking of human unions, of living together, of marriage, so Roithamer. People are forever denying the proven fact, so Roithamer, the simple fact of nature’s workings, that the female sex, because it is female, nobody dares to say it in so many words nowadays, that the female sex is anti-intellectual and emotionally predisposed to champion emotion, that it is in fact against intellect in all its possible aspects just as it is emotionally predisposed to emotion in all its possible aspects, so Roithamer. The current fashion is one thing, nature is something else. But then, our times are given over to nonsense and to warping all ideas and all the facts and turning them topsy turvy. I personally know from experience, so Roithamer, that the female human being, “female human being” underlined, that the female sex is incapable of going beyond the first impulse in the direction of the life of the mind. In our case, that of my mother and me, she was only interested in winning me over even if in the process she had to destroy everything I am, my personality, my character, my mind, she had to try it, again and again, in her perverse determination that it must be possible eventually to turn so stubborn a mind as mine, a mind so crazily intent on its own inventions, from its single-track obsession with itself, my self that is, and push it into a crude, Eferding-type domesticity, so Roithamer. She had to cut me down to her own Eferding size, her own existential minimum, and with me she meant to achieve this fully, not only partially as with my father, whom she certainly managed to alienate from himself to at least a high degree, she did alienate my father from himself to a very high, to an ominous degree, as she knew, to her lifelong (Eferdingian) satisfaction. To be fascinated by a man who is different from his observer, viewer, antagonist, yet pitting everything against this man and against the fascination he exerts, to be bent on taking from him everything that makes him fascinating. That woman from Eferding basically hated everything I did or didn’t do and everything my sister did or didn’t do and everything my father did and didn’t do, the victims of her hatred were primarily all those with whom I had intellectual intercourse, beginning with all natural scientists, writers, even poets, philosophers named in my books, in whom she thought she recognized me, and she thought she recognized me in all the books I had in my room, in the most widely differing books belonging to me and used by me all the time. In each one of these books she was bound to recognize me and she hated these books as she hated me, but she didn’t dare to destroy the books, to do away’ with them, she didn’t have the nerve to do that even though her thoughts and everything in her tended in that direction. If I merely think of all the things we came to quarrel about on our socalled walks, with such regularity and occasional obsessiveness, we’d taken our nature walks only to quarrel, always, we walked through the woods, and quarreled, over the meadows, and quarreled, through our gardens, and quarreled, even on the grassy riverbanks, always outwardly exemplars of the greatest serenity at the outset, we quarreled and transformed those grasslands in no time into a noisy, suddenly malignant landscape, where our attacking voices, shouting nothing but insults, could be heard, so Roithamer, all up and down the river. And it always began with trivia, but all these trivia had soon triggered off enormities against our fellow beings, against everything. Even in company the Eferding woman was incapable of controlling herself, of restraining herself, and so our father never took her out socially, after his first efforts along those lines had failed lamentably. Because the good name of all Altensam was always at stake, he had never taken his wife, our mother, the Eferding woman, to any social gathering, though she craved going out socially, but because of my father’s adamant refusal to take her out she soon found it possible to go out only to her own kind of social gathering, the so-called Eferding social gatherings and no longer to the Altensam social gatherings, but her own kind didn’t interest her, what she wanted was to get into Altensam society, which my father, however, denied her; I barred her way, so my father often said, so Roithamer, otherwise she’d have robbed Altensam, which had already lost most of its good name in her time, the Eferding woman’s time that is, she’d have robbed Altensam of all that was left of its good name, so my father, so Roithamer, “all that was left” underlined, but the consequence of this, that my father, after those first failed tries, simply no longer took her along into society but left her sitting at home, was that our mother, the Eferding woman, suddenly hated Altensam more than anything in the world, “more than anything in the world” underlined. My father had fallen prey to the error that he could turn a person like the Eferding woman, an Eferding person that is, into an Altensam person, one kind of person can never be made into another kind of person, so Roithamer, “never” underlined, most especially not an Eferding person into an Altensam person, it was probably because of this error that he took her home and married her, because he understood too late that you can never make an Altensam person out of an Eferding person, never change one species into another. Now and then she tried reading a book, it was all a hypocritical pretense, “hypocritical pretense” underlined, a book of which I had a very high opinion, a book about which I might have said something in her presence showing my great esteem for it, but these efforts of hers were from the first a transparent pretense, of course the Eferding woman’s position in Altensam was always untenable, she should never have come to Altensam in the first place, for if such a person, who isn’t an Altensamer, goes to Altensam, so Roithamer, that person will be destroyed, everything will be done to destroy such a person, to remove the person from Altensam because this is a person who doesn’t belong in Altensam, because this person is different by nature, “different by nature”

underlined, the Eferding woman should never have committed the crime of coming to Altensam, our father should never have brought her to Altensam, he should have explained to her, but he brought her up to Altensam out of embarrassment and weakmindedness and exposed her from the first to a situation she simply wasn’t equal to handling, even if she never realized it, she, the Eferding woman, simply never had been equal to Altensam, though most of the time she might have thought she was equal to Altensam, even that she dominated Altensam, most of the time, she was not equal to Altensam, though she actually came to dominate Altensam, so Roithamer, as I know, actually did dominate Altensam, but she was never really equal to it, so Roithamer, our father had to pay dearly for the crime of marrying an Eferding woman, so Roithamer, the Eferding woman had to pay for her crime of coming up to Altensam with lifelong unhappiness, for it was by the fact of coming to Altensam that the Eferding woman became an unhappy person, prior to that, in Eferding, in her father’s house, as the daughter of a butcher and an innkeeper, she’d never been unhappy, or she wasn’t likely, during those years, to be considered an unhappy person, not until she came to Altensam. The photographs I’ve seen that show her as the butcher’s daughter, innkeeper’s daughter from Eferding, don’t show an unhappy person, they show a young, though already old person, but’ not an unhappy person, the pictures of her in Altensam that I’ve seen, and my own experience are of an unhappy and always old person who is constantly ailing.

We children naturally showed no consideration whatever toward our mother,

“no” and “whatever” underlined, we, my sister and I, so Roithamer, we Altensamers in contrast to the Eferdingers, our brothers. In the early days when I returned from England, for instance, the Eferding woman had often said she’d like to walk down to Stocket with me, because she knew that I always liked walking down to Stocket, but once she’d walked down to Stocket with me, it was soon obvious to me that she’d really had no desire whatever to walk down to Stocket with me, because basically she hated this walking-down-to-Stocket with me and hated Stocket and hated the people down in Stocket. Or else she affected to be interested in a scientific article because she knew that I was interested in this article, but it was all pretense,

“pretense” underlined, so Roithamer. On such occasions I always countered with some malevolent remark that exposed her utter impudence, and our mutual hatred was reestablished. But it’s not true that we didn’t want to be in agreement. But if I happened to say, I hold so-and-so in contempt, for such-and-such a reason, she always instantly agreed with my verdict and so with my remark, without thinking, and this was bound to repel me. If I happened to show a liking for a certain play and praised this play, she felt obliged to praise the play though she hadn’t seen it, not for my sake, as I know, but for her own sake, even though she didn’t know the play, she nevertheless thought she could praise it too, and I was repelled by that. For instance I’d always said, time and time again, that I loved Goethe’s novel, Elective Affinities, but I knew that she hated Elective Affinities, basically there was no book in the world she hated as intensely as she hated Elective Affinities, yet she claimed that she shared my love for Elective Affinities, this was simply bound to repel me, so Roithamer. Then she claimed to have read Novalis, though she had never read as much as a line by Novalis, but every time it wasn’t really an effort to come closer to me, to try and bring about a real accord between her and me, between us, but rather an attempt to set a trap, but I never went into this trap, at least not in later years, for at first, in my childhood and youth, I did indeed and very often walk into her traps, the Eferding woman had always set traps in Altensam and all of us had always walked into her traps. Elective Affinities as a trap set for me, so Roithamer.

She had often given me to understand that she was intellectually engaged upon the same subject at the same time I was, but I’d soon found out that it was nothing more than one of her pretenses, that again she’d set me a trap that I was supposed to walk into. All these notes to be utilized one day for a description of my mother, in comparison with my sister and in contrast with my father and brothers, so Roithamer. We must always utilize, work up, everything. When we’re occupied with a so-called intellectual subject, and this subject is so great that we’re totally fascinated by it, we must be absolutely alone in our room (Hoeller’s garret) or wherever we happen to be, even if we’re not (in reality) in Hoeller’s garret, nevertheless in Hoeller’s garret, the place where we happen to find ourselves occupied with such a subject must become Hoeller’s garret for us, we mustn’t tolerate the slightest distraction, even if it came from the person closest to us (sister), we must forestall everything that interferes or could interfere with our concentration on that subject, and therefore could destroy, annihilate, extinguish this subject, which fascinates us, for such a subject is too easily destroyed and annihilated and extinguished and it always is the only subject for us, “only”

underlined. This intellectual subject matter must be held fast, until we have mastered it, so Roithamer, “mastered” underlined. Attempts to comprehend Altensam, to understand it, and little by little to comprehend and understand everything connected with Altensam, especially everything relating to my father, to keep on trying to find the causes and from these causes arrive at the effects of these causes, nothing can be fully grasped and explained by means of mental and emotional acuity on the one hand, nor by mental and emotional hypocrisy on the other hand, I have to keep reminding myself that it’s all from my point of view, not from the others’ point of view, always only from my point of view, from the others’ point of view it’s something entirely different, probably the opposite. But the opposite is not my task. I’m getting closer to Altensam, but I’m not getting closer to Altensam in order to solve its mystery; for others to explain it to myself is why I am getting closer to Altensam, to my Altensam, the one that I see. While she lived I never asked my mother, never asked her all these unanswered questions, never once asked her a single crucial question, because I never could formulate such a question, I was afraid I might put such a question wrong somehow, and so I never posed it, and so I got no answer. Now the Eferding woman is dead, I can’t ask her, she can’t answer. But would it be any different now, if I could ask her, and she could answer? We don’t ask those we love, just as we don’t ask those we hate, so Roithamer. Actually I’m shocked by everything I’ve just written, what if it was all quite different, I wonder, but I will not correct now what I’ve written, I’ll correct it all when the time for such correction has come and then I’ll correct the corrections and correct again the resulting corrections andsoforth, so Roithamer. We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously, because we recognize at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification and we correct the result of the correction of a correction andsoforth, so Roithamer. But the ultimate correction is one we keep delaying, the kind others have made without ado from one minute to the next, I think, so Roithamer, the kind they could make, by the time they no longer thought about it, because they were afraid even to think about it, but then they did correct themselves, like my cousin, like his father, my uncle, like all the others whom we knew, as we thought, whom we knew so thoroughly, yet we didn’t really know all these peoples’ characters, because their self-correction took us by surprise, otherwise we wouldn’t have been surprised by their ultimate existential correction, their suicide. It’s only a thought which keeps turning up, but we don’t take steps to correct ourselves. We sit here for hours on this chair and think about it, we may even be sitting here for days on this same chair, or stand at the window (as for instance in Hoeller’s garret), we may pace the floor in our room, lie on the bed, locked up in Hoeller’s garret or in my room in Altensam, which has always seemed to me my actual correction cell, “correction cell” underlined, but I kept putting off my correction, kept delaying it, though I never gave up the idea of correcting myself, we do it suddenly, quite suddenly we walk out, go away, break off everything, one step off the road, away, gone, so Roithamer, because we’ve lost our mind, so Roithamer, or because we suddenly are everything extreme, so Roithamer. We’re in a state of extreme concentration, we don’t even permit ourselves to change a piece of clothing, we permit ourselves nothing beyond this concentration, but we still don’t do it. We’re always quite close to correcting ourselves, to correcting everything by killing ourselves, but we don’t do it. Ready to correct our entire existence as a bottomless falsification and misrepresentation of our true nature, so Roithamer, but we don’t do it. While this thought keeps sinking in deeper, we’re at its mercy and we yield to it in every respect because we have become totally concentrated on this thought, but we don’t do it. Then we forget this theme, make no corrections, go on existing, until we’re back with this thought, addicted to it, so Roithamer. But one day, from one minute to the next, we’ll do what we have to do, and then there’ll be no difference between us and those who’ve already made their correction, killed themselves. To write to someone, for instance, because we can no longer bear our loneliness, we’ve borne our solitude to the limit, but we can bear it no longer, we write in order to be no longer alone but to be two of us, to my sister for instance, that I’d be glad if she’d come to England, soon, now, we write, to the person we love, the one we know most intimately, I write and telegraph simultaneously, my most intense idea now is that my sister must come to me, from Altensam to England, as quickly as possible, to put an end to this condition of solitude into which I’ve maneuvered myself, so Roithamer, she must come if I’m to be saved, I’m thinking, though I don’t write it, but I think she must come, to save me, because I’ve exhausted all my means of distracting myself, all my tricks of distracting myself, because I can think only this one thing, that I must come to an end in my room, unless this familiar, beloved person comes, I’ve no chances left. For days I wait for an answer, then my sister suddenly sends a telegram, she can’t come, so then I somehow keep going, I don’t put an end to it. It’s back to my work again, total immersion. Suddenly I no longer have any reason to kill myself, to make that correction. The message that my sister isn’t coming because she can’t come is enough to prevent me from doing it. But would I have done it? I ask myself, so Roithamer. Instead of committing suicide, people go to work. All their lives long, as long as their existence allows for this constantly recurring process, so Roithamer. The death of my uncle, so Roithamer, surprised even Hoeller, for Hoeller, like myself, had always been of the opinion that a man like my uncle, who kept coming back to the subject of suicide in conversation, because of the very fact that he keeps coming back to it and talks of it almost constantly, will not commit suicide, but he did commit suicide, the atmosphere in Hoeller’s house at the time was totally conditioned by the surprise of my uncle’s suicide, he’d thrown himself down the cheese-factory’s air shaft in Stocket; the whole Hoeller house, even Hoeller’s garret, I think, so Roithamer, this whole simple house with its complicated conditions, or vice versa, complicated house with its simple conditions, so Roithamer, lay as if under the pall of my uncle’s suicide. The moment I set foot in Hoeller’s house, that’s to say, the moment I clapped eyes on the huge black stuffed bird hanging on the wall of the vestibule, it was clear to me that the whole Hoeller house was under the pall of my uncle’s suicide. Then I remembered my last meeting with my uncle from Stocket, so Roithamer, and I asked myself whether there was anything about the man, on that last encounter, that might have given me a hint of his subsequent suicide, observing him first at the forest’s edge, with his rubber boots, short, frayed old jacket, so Roithamer, the hazel walking stick he’d whittled himself, the black hat on his head, and probably, considering his immobility, he’d had a wooden leg for years, also in view of my sudden presence, he was preoccupied with a so-called philosophical subject, I said to myself as I walked toward him, time had fashioned him into a so-called nature man, because everything in him and about him was predisposed that way, not a comic figure such as we see very often, everything about him said: I can no longer escape from nature; as I walked toward him, probably he didn’t even notice that I was coming toward him because everything seemed to indicate that he never noticed me, he was so preoccupied with his philosophical subject, that philosophical subject which had to do with nature.

When he spoke, it was only by indirection, he’d always been my philosopher, it was on his account that I always came down to Stocket from Altensam, the idea of thinking came to me in my first hesitant, then determined encounters with this man who’d always been my highest authority, my philosopher who had taught me to think, most unobtrusively, at first, but from the first with a decided firmness that endured. I’m no philosopher, he’d always said. He had a preference for old clothes, early rising, and washing in cold water. He placed Novalis above everything. Nature, not yet polluted by human beings, hence his early rising. A minimal breakfast, thick socks his sister had knitted from raw, untreated wool, and one of Novalis’s ideas. Time was to him only a means toward the constant study of time. Must I be with another person? he always answered: no, I need be with no other person. This question and this answer of his do more to explain his character than mine, so Roithamer. We admire a man like my uncle, who killed himself because he could no longer endure the unhappiness of mankind, as he wrote on the slip of paper they found in his coat pocket, dated by him on the day he threw himself down the air shaft of the cheese factory, because he’s ahead of us in having the capacity to commit suicide, not only to talk about committing suicide but to commit suicide in fact, so Roithamer. It’s always those upon whom we’d hung our hopes, so Roithamer, who kill themselves, those whose talent and personality we loved and whose presence was the most pleasing and most familiar to us, so Roithamer. Then: I often woke up in the night and asked myself, how high are the costs of building, actually? what if the costs of building the Cone exceed my means, on the one hand exceeding my financial means, on the other hand exceeding my intellectual means? How often I came unrecognized to Austria and to Altensam and stayed in the Kobernausser forest, in the wooden shack I put up myself on the spot I’d picked out as the site for the Cone, in the precise center of the Kobernausser forest, so Roithamer. And very often I came from England to Altensam, unrecognized, and into the Kobernausser forest and stayed there, at its very center, for days and once even for weeks, totally concentrated on the Cone and then went back just as unrecognized to England, to Cambridge. Several times, “several times” underlined, I started to write a letter to my sister, but I never finished writing those letters because I had to keep the Cone a secret from my sister, of course, and if I did drop a hint to her, and I had in fact dropped a hint several times, she’d think I was crazy, even my beloved sister thought I was crazy, so Roithamer, which is why I had to keep silent always about the Cone, even toward my sister. The edifice that was to bring me deep gratification but to my sister the highest, the supreme happiness, so Roithamer. Such a letter about the Cone would have been sure to have frightened her. What a lot of ideas go into the making of the Cone, all adding up to the idea of the Cone. He, Roithamer, I can see that now, lived in fear that he might go mad deep inside the Kobernausher forest, on precisely the geometrical centerpoint in the middle of the Kobernausser forest he had himself determined, because he had a bent in that direction, “bent”

underlined. Like his sister, he inclined to sudden madness, from sudden overstrain of his whole being, he feared that from overstraining his head he’d suddenly go mad. He’d decided at once on the size of the Cone and on the character of the interior, but he could no longer recall the exact point in time, to pinpoint that moment now, after so many years, “after so many years”

underlined, he found impossible. We must remember the onlookers who note our moment of weakness, mental weakness, in so enormous an effort, and use it to kill us, so Roithamer. We must never let up in intensity. Time is realization, idea, despair, and vice versa, so Roithamer. But I mustn’t act exclusively in accordance with my plan and a dead geometry, so Roithamer.

It’s all right to hesitate, but never out of even the slightest weakness.

Everything is equally important, whether it’s the idea (as a whole) or its smallest constituent. Actually always the simultaneous contemplation of the idea, I must contemplate everything at the same time and train myself in this simultaneity of contemplation in such a way that I come to see everything ever more clearly, nothing less sharply focused than anything else, so that the edifice exists (in my head) and then I must move it out of my head onto the geometric point. The question is, will I achieve my aim in my own way by talking, or not, or will it turn out to be only resignation as a fact, so Roithamer. Resignation, weakness, emptiness, the failure to make it real. It’s all a matter of schooling oneself, a school in which I am both the teacher and the pupil, and in the intensity between the two there’s one’s logical consistency, there’s the Cone. My lucidity peaks at night, an exceptional condition of my head, so Roithamer, then in the morning the Cone falls apart in my head. Always assuming that my idea of the Cone corresponds precisely to my sister’s needs, her character, her nature.

Novalis: the Cone is not what she is at this point, it is rather everything about her, corresponding to her eyes and ears, her hearing, feeling, intelligence, alertness, attention. Corresponding. It is the fact itself which dumbfounds and benumbs, not the rest of it, so Roithamer. And so I’ve never talked with a soul in Altensam (including father) about the Cone, though they all know that I’m building the Cone, they’ve all heard of it. Such a building changes the man who is building it, by the ways in which he speeds the work along and completes it. I used to be open to everything before I had the idea (of building the Cone), but now I’m nothing but the victim of the man who is building the Cone. If my head had known, so Roithamer. It seems that one’s head keeps being draw irresistibly to the most impossible problems, every time, to prove itself, so ‘ Roithamer. If we don’t, every time, involve ourselves in the most problematic undertakings, we’re lost, there’s nothing left, so Roithamer. What then follows is the catastrophe of breakdown, whatever our idea was about deserts us when we sleepwalkers awaken in the middle of what we were doing, so Roithamer.

Once we recognize the process, it’s already broken off, nothing’s left but a man who’s been destroyed, killed. We retreat to an idea, possibly the only idea we know nothing about, so Roithamer. We try to grasp the things we experience mentally. If I don’t work hard enough, ‘m destructive, if I work too hard, I’m destructive, so Roit amer. The question always arises, whether it’s the right moment. We see everything ridiculously interrelated, from England, from Altensam, in the middle of the Kobernausser forest. e have an idea, in the end it’s nothing, so Roithamer. Once he actually went as far as his sister’s door, in order to admit everything about the Cone to her, three o’clock in the morning, so Roithamer, I’ll wake her up and explain. But at four o’clock I laughed out loud and went back to my room. And if another man should faithfully follow my notes, my plans, everything I’ve got in my head, in executing the Cone, it still wouldn’t be the same Cone, so Roithamer. But if I had neglected my scientific work, genetic mutations, I’d also have neglected building the Cone, as it is, by not neglecting my scientific teaching and studies, I also did not neglect the building of the Cone. For I was actually (most intensely) occupied with building the Cone in the Kobernausser forest while I was working my hardest on genetic mutations in Cambridge, and vice versa (March 3). The cause of work for and intensification of the one, the cause of work for and intensification of the other, so Roithamer, I never asked myself whether I am neglecting my scientific work by pushing on with building the Cone, and vice versa, it was a question I dared not ask myself, so Roithamer. The time was as favorable to my Cone building as it was for my scientific work, I achieved all I could, so Roithamer. Now I’ve left science and the Cone to nature, so Roithamer. Just as no one will ever set foot inside the Cone again, so no one will enter into my scientific work. That it’s possible to consider and act simultaneously upon two (seemingly) contradictory opposites, so Roithamer. To make full use of one’s mental state in every case and at every moment and never weaken in that direction, so Roithamer. We may not question our actions, so Roithamer.

Juxtapose my lack of sympathy to my mother’s, my parents’, my brothers’

lack of sympathy, so Roithamer. The Cone cost more to build than any other edifice in Austria, as I hear, I’ve obtained the figures on it, so Roithamer.

Total isolation in Cambridge alternated with total isolation in the Kobernausser forest, where I fixed up a room for myself in the builder’s work hut, for the times when it’s impossible for me to stay in Hoeller’s garret, because I have to be at the building site (March 7), so Roithamer. The secrecy with which I pursued building the Cone in Cambridge, the same secrecy in Altensam, the same secrecy at the Hoeller house, so Roithamer.

But at night I worked on genetic mutations, in the builder’s hut as well as in Hoeller’s garret, even though I was wholly occupied with the Cone, so Roithamer, there was no outward indication by which an onlooker could have recognized that I was working on genetic mutations while overseeing the building of the Cone in the Kobernausser forest, and on the Cone in Cambridge, while I was teaching and studying, so Roithamer. Every day one idea connected neither with building the Cone nor with my natural science, so Roithamer. The highest demands made of the one discipline applied to the other discipline, so Roithamer. To build, and realize, and complete such an edifice means always to hear and see everything connected with the edifice, meaning of course to hear and see everything and to act on one’s experience of all this hearing and seeing, so Roithamer. What if I’d suddenly informed my sister about my building the Cone? which I didn’t do, so saving myself and my plan. We keep silent about what we know, and make good progress, so Roithamer. At night he’d always heard the woodworm in Altensam, the voracity of the woodworms would keep him awake all night, everywhere and naturally most of all at night, because of his keen hearing and that oversensitive head of his, he heard the woodworm, the deathwatch beetle, at work, in the floor planks and under the floor planks, in the wardrobes and chests, in all the chest drawers most of all, so Roithamer, in the doors and in the window frames, even in the clocks and the chairs and overstuffed armchairs, he’d always been able to distinguish exactly where and in which object, which piece of furniture, a woodworm was at work, the woodworm had actually already gnawed its way into his own bed, while lying awake in bed all night long, so Roithamer, he’d watched the woodworm’s progress, had to watch it, with most concentrated attention, he’d breathed in the sweetish smell of the fresh wood meal and felt depressed at the thought that through all the years thousands, possibly tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of woodworms had infiltrated into Altensam in order to devour Altensam, to keep gnawing away at Altensam and devouring it until it collapsed in one moment, a moment that would quite possibly not be too long in coming. There wasn’t a single object in Altensam, so Roithamer, with out the woodworm in it, and even if it happened to be a new object, something recently acquired, the woodworm would have invaded this new object in no time at all, so Roithamer. When I take a piece of underwear out of a drawer, so Roithamer, I have to shake it out, because it’s full of wood meal, overnight my fresh laundry is full of wood meal, so Roithamer, when I take a handkerchief out of the drawer, I have to blow the wood meal off of it, even the dishes in daily use have to be blown and wiped off, so Roithamer, because they’re covered with wood meal, and actually everybody in Altensam is always full of wood meal, their faces are covered with wood meal, their heads and bodies covered with wood meal, so Roithamer. They were all constantly afraid they might break through the floor planks, because the floor planks were already ominously giving way here and there, because Altensam was constantly changing under the influence of the woodworm’s work (and the dry rot, of course!) they lived in chronic anxiety, because in fact the most noticeable and frightening manifestation in Altensam has been the work of the woodworms, so Roithamer. At first everything was tried against the woodworms, but in the end we had to admit that nothing can be done against woodworms, and we stopped trying. All our lives long in Altensam we were confronted with millions of woodworms, without a chance of defending ourselves against these millions of woodworms. Helpless against the woodworms, so my mother, so Roithamer, we fought the woodworms all our lives, but had to give up the struggle in the end, so my mother, so Roithamer. Each generation in turn, so Roithamer, had pitted itself against the woodworm in Altensam, each feared it would be the one over whose heads Altensam would suddenly collapse, because Altensam is totally riddled by the woodworm, so Roithamer. Once my father sent for a so-called pest control man from Linz, who came up to Altensam and spent weeks there, in vain of course, so Roithamer. And so everyone in Altensam had become accustomed to walking around there in an oddly circumspect manner, because of the woodworms and their centuries-long work of undermining Altensam to the point of having almost worked their way through all of it, everyone adapted his walk most carefully to the floor planks and the wooden ceilings, with an eye to the furniture as well, such an oddly careful manner of walking, simply being considerate of Altensam, and when we had a general conversation, so Roithamer, which happened at most once a year in all these years, then it was the woodworm we talked about. No matter how quiet it is in Altensam, so quiet at times that not a sound seems to be heard, one nevertheless hears the woodworm at Altensam, so Roithamer. The wardrobes, the tables, all stand at a slant, the chests of drawers, the chairs, so Roithamer, the floors are subsiding, the windows no longer fit into their framework, so Roithamer, the struggle against the woodworm had been totally given up (March 9), so Roithamer. Suddenly, after weeks of concentrated mental work, so Roithamer, I went to Marks & Spencer to buy a pullover because my old one, which I’ve worn incessantly all year long, suddenly looked too shabby to me. Walking down Oxford Street to Marks & Spencer I felt supremely happy, so Roithamer, and back to my room with the new pullover (March 11). He locks himself into his room and tries to start his work on the allopolyploids, an inescapable task, already far advanced, so Roithamer, so that he couldn’t shake off his obsession with this task, but after he had made all his preparations for this work, checked the window, checked the door, so Roithamer, checked his chair as well as t e door, all these important steps prior to beginning his work taken and checked out, including checking out the precisely geometric arrangement of all objects he had personally placed on his table and around his table, in his working area, ever, thing had its place and the slightest deviation would have made it impossible for him to begin his work, so Roithamer,. he always had to spend a not inconsiderable amount of time putting all these objects into the position favorable to the starting off of his work process, his own person being also subjected to this drive for order, this absolute discipline of order, physical condition, clothing, everything; for instance, the top shirt-buttons had to be undone, sleeves rolled up andsoforth, so Roithamer, “rolled up” underlined, but first and foremost, the door to his workroom must be locked, the key turned twice in the lock, this dual turning of the key always was of the utmost importance, for the mere chance of someone suddenly opening the door and walking in, someone who was bound to disturb him, whoever it was, this was totally incapacitating, so it often happened that he’d already begun on his work, he’d be all set mentally and had sat down at his worktable, but had forgotten to lock the door, so he had to jump up again and lock the door, but by then it was too late, this short interruption, when he’d already sat down at the table, jumping up, that is, in order to lock the door, was all it took to make further work impossible for him, or else something was wrong with the curtains and he’d have to jump up and put whatever it was with the curtains in order, or some noise made him jump up and forced him to look out the window, or else it was something fallen to the floor, a piece of paper or a crumb of food or a thread or even a dead fly he’d overlooked and which suddenly constituted an unbearable irritation, in total contrast to Hoeller’s garret, so Roithamer, where everything was always simply ideal for him, but if he worked anywhere else, as for instance in his room in Cambridge, under the circumstances sketched above, circumstances which were always invariably awful, time-consuming and nerve-wracking, he was always wishing only that he might be in Hoeller’s garret instead, whenever he couldn’t be there, so Roithamer, even if he was disturbed only by the sudden thought of such a possible form of disorder. It wasn’t the actual object itself, all it took was the thought of such an object possibly lying about in disorder, so Roithamer, to make him rise from his desk at once, to find out for certain, whether his supposition was correct andsoforth, so Roithamer, he might happen to be deeply absorbed in his work and the work might be going rather well and then suddenly he’d discover something out of order in his surroundings, even if it were only a shadow cast by an object which was itself in order, but was brought into disorder by its shadow, the kind of shadow that might be cast on the windowsill or the floor or even on the desk as a worktable, so Roithamer, which suddenly disturbs everything to the point of destroying everything, and he’d have to get up from his desk and first straighten out this particular object, because he couldn’t stand the disorder, at the very least he had to see what exactly the disturbing element was, so he actually found it impossible, most of the time, to work (in Cambridge), only every third or fourth day, because there was always some obstacle or other, or else because, after he’d begun to work and had possibly become deeply immersed in work, possibly very deeply immersed, suddenly some irritant presented itself, an irritating sound or an irritating object, which he possibly hadn’t seen or hadn’t heard before he began his work, he often had to get up or jump up only because a book on his desk was not positioned at the correct right angle, or because a so-called bookmark in a book or pamphlet suddenly annoyed him, one of the many hundreds of bits of paper he tore off the daily newspaper to use as bookmarks, which he used to mark his page in all the books and periodicals lying around all over the place, for when such strips of newsprint used as bookmarks stick out of the books beyond the bearable length of six or seven or eight centimeters, when he’d suddenly noticed it and couldn’t stand it, or else he’d noticed a fingerprint that had escaped him up to that point, the kind of fingerprints on the books and papers, on his desk or even on the door, on the window frames andsoforth, so Roithamer, which other people naturally don’t notice, can’t notice, or suppose it’s a whole handprint, so Roithamer, “whole handprint” underlined, even if he only imagined that there might be such a fingerprint or a whole handprint on the door, he had to jump up and check the door or the windows, and once he was disturbed in his work, no matter how deeply he had already immersed himself in it, at first not to a degree that would interfere with his work, but then suddenly he did turn out to be most ruthlessly disturbed, from an observer’s point of view, in his work to a degree that indeed interfered and in fact brought his work to a sudden stop, he’d have to break off his work because he suspected there was a fingerprint (his own or that of another person) on the door or the window frame andsoforth, and he’d get up and rush to the door, “rush” underlined, and examine it, and actually he’d always find what he’d suspected would be there, even if it was the most senseless suspicion, he’d find it confirmed, everything suspected always turned out to be a fact, if for instance he suspected that something wasn’t quite in order under his desk, though he couldn’t see it, since the tabletop naturally prevented him from seeing beneath it, and if he proceeded to act on his suspicion without regard to the disturbing effect such an interruption would have on the work he had just begun, if his suspicion turned out to be founded in fact, he’d break off his work, crawl under the table, find the disorderly or disturbing object andsoforth, so Roithamer, he always found something wrong, something disturbing, once he crawled under the table, such a suspicion had never turned out to be unwarranted, so Roithamer, anyway he found it and straightened it out, though it jeopardized his work, the concentration required for his brain work which he had started but had to break off because of the disorder, but he had to straighten out the disorder under his desk or on the window or wherever it might occur in his study, and I tried, so Roithamer, after once more making sure that I really was locked into my room, by turning the key twice in the lock, so Roithamer, I was in control, and having taken control I felt reassured that I was indeed locked into my room, and I tried to make some progress in my work on the allopolyploids (March 17), so Roithamer, “tried” underlined. I recall a little essay on the thorn apple, the so-called datura stramonium, that he did after his sister’s death, on coming back from Altensam to Cambridge, to regain his peace of mind, while I went to the Tate Gallery, so Roithamer, alone, because I always had to visit this museum alone, it’s my favorite museum, the only museum in the world which I not only could endure but could actually love, during this visit to the Tate, so Roithamer, I was able to gain a little peace of mind by working on the thorn apple, the so-called datura stramonium, because I was working most intently, while at the Tate Gallery, on this little paper which I believe turned out rather well, I was working on William Blake for one thing, and for the other on the thorn apple, it was good for me in the condition in which I was left by the death of my sister, in that mentally dull, mind-disturbing and mind- de stroying condition, so Roithamer, which suddenly inspired me to write something about the thorn apple, for my own distraction, to distract my head from the death of my sister, so Roithamer.

My study of the thorn apple, written while totally stunned by the cause of my sister’s death: my finishing the Cone, so Roithamer. Taking refuge from one science in another, so Roithamer, an artful device to break off one (tormenting) subject by taking up again another (an old, ancient) subject, so Roithamer (19 March). The thorn apple, because I considered my work on the Cone concluded, so Roithamer. But haunted by the notion that I must work on the Cone, so Roithamer, although the Cone is a closed chapter, the Cone is now exposed and abandoned to nature, so Roithamer. The notion I had from the first moment, regarding the site for the Cone: the middle of the Kobernausser forest, which corresponds with the present site of the Cone.

Supreme happiness, so Roithamer, as the instant cause of (my sister’s) death, so Roithamer. The notion of turning a calculated center (forty-two kilometers from Mattighofen) into an actual center, incessant doubts (March 21). First the natural history, then statics, or first statics, then natural history,

statics

as

natural

history

andsoforth,

so

Roithamer.

Nature/man/statics, so Roithamer. To put the men to work like one’s own brain and to treat these working people as one treats one’s own brain, driving both toward the target to the limit of their capacity (March 23), so Roithamer. Giving it all they’ve got every minute. Ease, insolence, we see the building developing from our plans, the building plans turning into a reality, event, fulfillment of the event. To be in England, while the Cone is being built in the Kobernausser forest, but to remain for all the future in England. What we do secretly, succeeds, so Roithamer. What we publish is destroyed in the instant of publication. When we say what we are doing, it’s destroyed. The strain so exacerbated that it must end in the destruction (of the head and the body) of the nature of head and body, so Roithamer. We work on the periphery (England) in the center (Kobernausser forest). In company taciturn, then suddenly, out of this taciturnity, to talk, to talk again and again, to persuade, to despair, to talk and be afraid, over and over, and make them afraid, a constant process of making things known, everything known, they fear this as much as we do, so Roithamer. Until our ability to take it in is exhausted. When one studies statics, he learns to understand nature more and more, so Roithamer. First I let all these hundreds of books into my head, then my loathing for all these books, papers, which I’ve suddenly given up (April 2). First I bind (chain) everything to my head, then to my body, body and head all at the same time, “all” underlined. The Cone represents the logic of my (my sister’s) nature. I built the Cone as a natural scientist, so Roithamer, from England, in Austria, I wouldn’t have had the strength to do it from Austria, so Roithamer. First the idea of destroying the Cone (after my sister’s death), but I shall leave it to nature, entirely. But the edifice as a work of art is finished only after the death of the person for whom it was built and finished, so Roithamer. We think we are building an edifice, a work of art, but what we have built is something else. The doors of the Cone all open toward the inside, so Roithamer, “inside” underlined. At eighteen or nineteen I could not have had this idea, at forty-one I could no longer have had it, so Roithamer. The so-called architects, so Roithamer, all thought I was crazy, such an edifice cannot be built, but it is a question of the occasion of mental acuity (April 3). The question was not only, how do I build the Cone, but also, how do I keep the Cone, the building of the Cone a secret, so Roithamer. Half of my energies were concentrated on building the Cone, half of them on keeping the Cone a secret, so Roithamer. When a man plans such an enormity, he must always retain control of everything and keep everything secret, so Roithamer. First based on my reading, then on the basis of reading no longer taken into account, so Roithamer. My own ideas had led with logical consistency to the realization and completion of the Cone, when my sister was frightened to death, the Cone was finished, so Roithamer, I could not have taken her into the Kobernausser forest at any other than the deadly moment, she had dreaded this moment, when she dreaded it most deeply I took her there and so killed her, at the same time I’d finished the Cone (April 7), so Roithamer. For supreme happiness comes only in death, so Roithamer. Detour by way of the sciences to supreme happiness, death, so Roithamer. The experts, the critics, the destroyers, annihilators, so Roithamer. We always come close to the edge of the abyss and fear the loss of equilibrium, so Roithamer. When a body that has briefly lost its balance instantly resumes its original equipoise, then it has a stable equilibrium, so Roithamer. If, on the other hand, a body appears balanced in any given new position, “new Position” underlined, without returning to its original position, then its equilibrium is indifferent. When a body whose equilibrium is briefly disturbed does not return to its original balanced position but seeks a new equilibrium, then its equilibrium is labile, so Roithamer. The Cone’s physical center of gravity rests on its axis, so Roithamer, through the gravitational center of the base and the tip of the body at one-fourth its height a body needs at least three points of support, not in a straight line, to fix its position, so Roithamer had written. When we wake up, we feel ashamed, waking up is the always frightening minimum of existence, so Roithamer (April 9). The situation is always the same, in rational terms: wake up, wash, get dressed, work, see people, don’t despair, try not to despair (April 11). We accept (April 11). We answer the letters we receive, no matter whom or where they come from, not because a trap has been set for us in all of these letters (April 13). If I had not become involved with the art of building, it would have been something else, equally terrible.

One is always suddenly repelled by seeing how common people are, by their viciousness, bad taste, brutality, vulgarity. Understood nature, by understanding myself, nothing. They (friends) come in and sit down and the talk is, as it always has been; about philosophy, building, natural history, travels, natural catastrophes, books, the past, the future, theater andsoforth, it seems to be as always, but it’s suddenly deadly (April 17). Everything is ultimately the Cone. When I’m listening, I’m struck by the fact that I tend to think everything out beyond what the thinker who is doing the talking- does, so Roithamer. The building of the Cone has probably caused her mortal illness to break out, my sister has always had her mortal illness, just as everyone has his mortal illness from the first. One temporizes with a mortal illness, with death, then abruptly death comes, so Roithamer. Pine trunks: gigantic asparagus stalks of death, so Roithamer. The Kobernausser forest the end for her (my sister), for me (April 19). Mozart, Webern, nothing more (April 21). To build an edifice for a person, the most beloved person, as a crazy idea and to destroy, to kill this person with the completion of that edifice, the Cone. At first: many rooms, then: few rooms, then: suitable rooms, rooms suitable for her, so Roithamer. A body is not necessarily tipped over by all the forces acting on it, so Roithamer, insofar as regards the critical tipping edge these forces rather impart a varying impetus for turning the body around, so they partially counter act the tipping over (April 23). A body does not tip over when the force holding it upright in place is stronger than the force pushing it over. Lawfulness of the material. There is no backing out so close to the goal, so Roithamer. At the time I had decided to build my sister the Cone, my knowledge of building was not yet sufficient to enable me to start building in confidence, so I’d begun to build in a state of extreme nervous tension, while at the same time beginning an even more comprehensive study of building, at first I’d planned a year’s study, then two years, but I ended up having to study statics and stress analysis and building technique for three years. My talks with the experts involved had led to nothing, my reading ultimately led to nothing, it was only my discussions with Hoeller and then my totally independent approach to building that made it possible for me to realize my plan, so Roithamer. The experts had only distracted, deceived and delayed me, the progress I made in my thinking about the Cone I owed to my constant contemplation and study of the Hoeller house. Books, articles, experts had never really been much use in my case anyway, so Roithamer. All those experts thought they were dealing with a madman, so that my talks with them were always setbacks in my plan, so Roithamer. If I’m going to build my sister an edifice suited to her nearly a hundred percent, I had thought, then I must first of all study my sister’s personality and in addition the basic principles of statics and stress analysis, so Roithamer. The more openly I spoke of my plan, the crazier I seemed to my listeners, but in the end I didn’t care about the opinion of all those people who considered themselves experts, all I cared about was my project, the execution of my plan, the realization of my idea, which kept looking crazier to me, too, the deeper I got into it, but every idea is a crazy idea, so Roithamer. Like all those who pursue an idea, which is ipso facto a crazy idea, I had to pursue my crazy idea, and I could not allow myself to be dissuaded from this crazy idea by anything whatever, especially not by myself, for I had the greatest doubts, but the greater my doubts, the more stubbornly I pursued my idea, and in the end nothing could have made me abandon my idea, I wouldn’t have let anything make me abandon it, I’d allowed myself to be irritated over it all the time, but not to abandon it, but the chronic irritation by my idea finally resulted in my having the absolute certainty that I would pursue my idea till I reached my goal, its realization and fulfillment in the Cone, so Roithamer. All those irritations effected in me only a greater obstinacy and a greater fascination with my idea, so Roithamer. As my irritation increased, I was forced to think and act with greater precision, so Roithamer. A man who says he is building for his sister a Cone in which she must live in future, is bound to seem crazy, so Roithamer. And when he says he is building a Cone for his sister in the middle of the Kobernausser forest, in its exact geometrical center, impossible to calculate according to the experts, but I was finally able to prove it, he must seem even crazier, and when he says that he is building for his sister, in the middle of the Kobernausser forest, a Cone in which his sister must live for the rest of her life and be happy, supremely happy, he must be regarded as even crazier still, so Roithamer. But we mustn’t let ourselves be so irritated that we abandon our intention, so Roithamer, only irritated enough to further our intention, for irritation is also most useful to no matter what intention, even the craziest, so Roithamer. We always think that we’re now so irritated that we’ll have to abandon our intention, no matter what intention, because the people around us will not tolerate such a plan (like the building of the Cone), but we must not suffer the kind of irritation that will force us to abandon our intention. Wherever we look, we see nothing but abandoned intentions, for the so-called realized and completed edifices we see everywhere in the world are also nothing but abandoned intentions, so Roithamer. But I, in contrast to all these hundreds of thousands and millions of so-called realized and completed, but in reality abandoned (building)-

intentions which are seen standing around all over the surface of the globe, I fulfilled my intention, I managed to realize and fulfill it even though I had to do so in a frenzy of irritation, everything tends only to irritate me, so Roithamer. Every idea leads to extreme irritation, so Roithamer. The head of a planner and builder, so Roithamer, has to reach and fulfill its aim in a state of extreme irritation, so Roithamer. First there were the socalled geologists whom I felt obliged to consult and who caused me the utmost irritation with their disdain, then I suffered extreme, utmost irritation and disdain from the socalled architects, then from the skilled workers, again extreme irritation and disdain, but all this utmost irritation and disdain was necessary, so Roithamer, to make me create and perfect the Cone, I’d never have reached my goal without my irritation and their disdain, I’d simply have been too weak to fulfill it. They all told me that I lacked all the necessary qualifications to create, much less fulfill my plan, yet now I am in a position to say that I had precisely all the necessary qualifications, because the Cone is done, perfectly. Even though the effect of the finished Cone is not as anticipated, so Roithamer, but the effect of a finished task is always unexpected, it’s always the opposite of what we expected and very often a deadly effect, so Roithamer. They told me that while I have the talent I do not have the staying power, but I did have the staying power and luckily I was also, during the whole time they were building the Cone, absolutely unyielding against everything, “everything” underlined. Suddenly I’d realized that the people around me, whom I’d considered competent because I thought them more experienced than myself, were totally incompetent, that the so-called competent people are never and in no way competent and that it’s always only one’s own head, and only that part of one’s head which is wholly concentrated on its objective, which can be competent, so Roithamer, but to reach that point I had a long, weary, and painful way to go. A man who says that he is building for his sister an edifice designed especially for her, with the air- and light-conditioning that will be perfect for her, and who even names the site (an impossible site to obtain) and says that he won’t let anything get in the way of his plan or the realization of his plan, such a man is seen as a madman by all those to whom he’s confided his intention, so Roithamer, and so, while they had to accept me as an established scientist they also had to regard me as an absolute madman. And so the people around me simulate respect and do all they can to destroy my ideas, all ideas, so Roithamer. Wherever we turn in this world, all we see is nothing but destroyed ideas, all there is, as any reasonable person must admit, is nothing but destroyed ideas, just as everything is only a fragment, it’s always only an abandoned intention, so Roithamer. But the world has resigned itself to this state of affairs and made itself at home in it, so Roithamer. While they (the so-called architects) regard themselves as competent, as renewers of the earth’s surface, as bold, openminded free planners, they’re in fact nothing but chronic deserters of original ideas, they create nothing, build nothing, accomplish nothing, they only produce mere fragments, always, so Roithamer, the earth’s surface is cluttered with their fragments. They couldn’t and certainly wouldn’t understand my idea, anyway they never had accepted it, while all the time masquerading as the most fearless avant-garde building artists in the world, so Roithamer. They hadn’t gone along with my ideas at all, never went with me for even the shortest distance in my thinking, made too uneasy, probably, by the thought of where I might lead them, so they’d always given up at the outset, when I asked them to join me in my ideas, in my thinking, they held back, but after never even entering into my thinking they decided I was crazy, in the very act of pronouncing the idea I’d given them of my plan interesting, they were saying that I was crazy, so Roithamer. They were afraid of choking to death inside my mental processes, so Roithamer. And so I had only Hoeller, in reality and in fact, Hoeller followed me into my mental processes from the first, he’d dared to follow me in my thinking because it was not unfamiliar to him, it resembled his own, so that he had preceded me there, to him it wasn’t the dark frightening maze it was to those architects, though he might have felt a bit queasy entering into my much longer (than his) mental processes, so Roithamer, but Hoeller never thought me crazy, never, so Roithamer, because he, Hoeller, was experienced along such lines of thought and had no need to be afraid, “no need to be afraid” underlined, of and inside such lines of thought. One has to be able to get up and walk away from every social gathering that’s a waste of one’s time, so Roithamer, to leave behind the nothing faces and the often boundlessly stupid heads, and to walk out and down and into the open air and leave everything connected with this worthless society behind, so Roithamer, one must have the strength and the courage and the relentlessness even toward oneself, to leave all these ridiculous, useless, dim-witted people and heads behind and breathe free, breathe out what’s been left behind and breathe in something new, one must abandon at top speed these useless social agglomerations, banded together for their inevitable dim-witted purposes, so as not to become part of these dim-witted social groups, to get back to oneself from these social doings and find peace and light in oneself, so Roithamer. One must have the courage and the strength to break away from such company, such entertainment, such verbal violence andsoforth, in which one has become involved against one’s will, one must break away under any circumstances, so Roithamer, one must break off every one of these unspeakably stupid conversations, break away and walk away from all these senseless, useless and invariably dangerous subjects, to save oneself, rescue one’s own head by escaping at any moment, at any time, from wherever it is, to escape into the open air, so Roithamer. To be honest, almost all the social gatherings we’ve ever been drawn into, without quite knowing how or why, strike us as useless, they serve no purpose at all, all they do is weaken us. At the right moment we must get up and leave such gatherings, circumstances, conditions, for what naturally becomes a lengthy, lasting, always unending solitude, so Roithamer. Such a rising up and going away is a daily occurrence, always we leave behind a society that repels us, so Roithamer. But as we keep leaving them, they more and more regard us as crazy and hate us, a situation that worsens from day to day, that militates against our head and against our character and against our whole being, so Roithamer. That the people I described in “About Altensam and about everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone” are not the same as those I knew grew clear to me when I stepped into my train, my second-class compartment, in London, or rather at Victoria Station. Even before the train left, so Roithamer, I’d realized that everything I’d described in my manuscript was not so, that everything is always different from the way it’s been described, the actual is always different from the description, Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, it’s different. Dover, Brussels, Cologne, I had to recognize that everything in my manuscript was all wrong, the characters are different, the character is another, so Roithamer. As my brothers came forward to meet me in Stocket, I had the evidence that everything I’d described was all wrong. Even before Dover I’d started to make corrections in the manuscript and little by little I’d corrected everything and finally realized that nothing in it expresses the reality as it actually is, the description runs counter to the actuality, but I drew the logical consequences from this insight, so Roithamer, I did not hesitate to correct everything all over again and in the process of correcting everything all over again, so Roithamer, I destroyed everything. That none of them are what they are, that nothing is what it is, so Roithamer, as I realized back at Victoria Station. The fact of my sister’s funeral on the one hand, the fact that everything is all wrong on the other, I was preoccupied with these facts while crossing the Channel to the Continent and on through the incessant downpour along the whole plain all the way to Altensam, where my first encounter with my brothers proved to me that everything I feared was indeed true, so Roithamer. I had taken my manuscript out of my traveling bag and I’d seen at once that everything in my manuscript was all wrong, that I’d not only described some things badly, but that I’d described everything all wrong, because the opposite is true, so Roithamer. Yet I suddenly again felt like changing what I had done in years of hard effort into something else, suddenly on the train I was once more in the same state in which I’ve always been when I believed I was finished with something, at such a moment I know it’s all the other way round, and I’m willing to do it over the other way around. Little by little a new manuscript would be the result, as it is now again, an entirely different, new manuscript resulting from the destruction of the old one, but best of all was not to let a new one come into being, to stop making positive corrections, best to destroy it altogether, so Roithamer. When I make corrections, I destroy, when I destroy, I annihilate, so Roithamer. What I used to consider an improvement, formerly, is after all nothing but deterioration, destruction, annihilation. Every correction is destruction, annihilation, so Roithamer. This manuscript too is nothing but a mad aberration, just as perhaps and with certainty, “with certainty” underlined, the erection of the Cone was nothing but a mad aberration, those who always regarded the building of the Cone as a mad aberration, seem to have been proven basically right, so the manuscript was also nothing but a mad aberration, but he’d have to accept responsibility for this mad aberration and take it to its logical conclusion, it was absolute madness, so Roithamer, to build the Cone and to write this manuscript about Altensam, and these two crazy acts, one resulting from the other and both with the utmost ruthlessness, have done me in, “have done me in”

underlined. When I said to my sister, the Cone is yours, it belongs to you, I built it for you, and specifically in the center of the Kobernausser forest, I saw that the effect of the Cone on my sister was devastating. What followed was sheer horror, so Roithamer, nothing else, slow death, immersion in her sickness unto death, nothing else, from that moment onward everything led to her certain death (May 3). All of them secluded in their rooms waiting for their supper, which has always been an occasion for every kind of mutual recrimination, as though supper were the time to release twenty-two hours of accumulated hatred, aversion, mutual hatred, mutual aversion, so Roithamer. Silence at first (but a different kind of silence from that in Hoeller’s house) then recriminations, politeness followed by insinuations, then open hatred in every direction, so Roithamer. The Eferding woman always had more than one complaint to air, insinuations against myself and my sister primarily and against my father who ended up always taking his food in a state of apathy, fixedly staring at the tabletop, he simply withdrew from all that mealtime verbal filth, so Roithamer. The rest all went at it, attacking each other brutally every way they could think of, vulgarly, viciously. With the entrée came the overture, as it were, of accusations, the main course was the outbreak of the verbal storm, so Roithamer. Wounding the heart and the mind, so Roithamer. Crippling souls, wrecking brains, so Roithamer. It was all far beyond anything an outsider could imagine, day after day, the terrifying regularity of it, so Roithamer. When we had guests, we might exercise some self-control for an hour, no longer, then it broke down, we were no longer embarrassed even by the presence of the guests, soon guests became a rarity at Altensam, so Roithamer. Even in earliest childhood I’d preferred being alone, I lived a shut-in solitary life, my childhood was always lived alongside, but not with, the others. Alongside my parents and siblings, I was always alone, alongside my schoolmates, I was alone, alongside the others I pursued my studies, my science, realization, fulfillment, destruction, annihilation. In every case and in every cause this was the sequence, so Roithamer. I could be among (and with) people for only the briefest periods of time, my tendency was to start withdrawing, retreating from them, even at the moment of approaching them, even while drawing closer to them, so Roithamer. Experience teaches you to keep your distance to the end of your life, because people only come close and close in on you to disturb and destroy you, always, so my uncle, so Roithamer. A man approaches another only to destroy him, so Roithamer. We go out to meet people because we think it’s to our advantage to do so, always keeping the true (only) reason for meeting them, society, to ourselves, our so-called selflessness is a false front, so Roithamer. Whenever we see someone getting along well we soon take a hand, we go to him to disturb him, to destroy, to annihilate him, if we can. However we can manage it, so Roithamer. Parents seen as the first destroyers of their children, annihilators of their children, and vice versa. Being on our guard against everything, we end up being for the longest time alone with ourselves, totally, painfully out of touch, so Roithamer. If we make contact, we must break it off at once, if we’re men of character, still have character, so Roithamer. More and more only the briefest social experiences, so Roithamer. While building the Cone I met all sorts of people, never before so many, and I worked with all of these people and was happy with all these people, but I was never so alone as with and among all these people, so Roithamer. Completely alone with my idea, so Roithamer. We are different from the person who is being judged when it is our own person, our own character, that is being judged, so Roithamer. Like the landscape, like the natural scene in (around) us, like whatever we have created, so Roithamer. We see a landscape and we see a man in that landscape and the landscape and the man are always different, each moment, although we assume that everything always remains the same, and thanks to this false assumption we dare to go on with our existence, so Roithamer. So we’re never exactly the person we are, but always already something different, though still just barely ourselves if we’re lucky, so Roithamer. We’ve developed by surrendering something of ourselves, little by little, and so we’ve remained the same, though changed, so Roithamer.

But the schools we’ve attended have been wholly devastating in their influence on us, they depressed me, every school I ever attended, had to attend, has humiliated me. At first I listened in every direction and entered into all these directions, then I stopped listening, stopped entering into things, so Roithamer. Soon I’d latched onto one system, then to another system, now I’d be convinced by the one, then again by another, so Roithamer. In the schools it’s always the same old stale stuff that’s spread before us, it destroys the mind and the spirit of the learner, the student, stage by stage, in the schools we are turned into despairing men, who can never again escape from their despair, so Roithamer, we enter a school only to be destroyed by that school, annihilated by history, so Roithamer, mathematics annihilates us, the unnaturalness of school annihilates us, so Roithamer. We never recover from school once we’ve left school, any school, we’re branded by the school, i.e., we’re destroyed, so Roithamer. We always enter a school only to be annihilated, the schools are gigantic institutions for the annihilation of the young, those who come to them for help are annihilated, but the state has its own good reasons for financing the schools, so Roithamer, once we leave school, our slow death has simply reached a more advanced stage, nothing else. Like madmen those who need spiritual help enter a school and leave it as dead men, and no one rebels against this, so Roithamer. The young people, healthy individuals, enter the schools looking for help, they come out destroyed, crippled, debilitated for life, so Roithamer. The destruction of the very young starts in grade school, so Roithamer, imagine then what goes on in the secondary schools and the institutions of higher and highest learning. Institutions for the deformation of human beings, so Roithamer. “About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone” I had first to bring to its conclusion before I could realize that everything is different, “everything”

underlined. Correction of the correction of the correction of the correction, so Roithamer. Signs of madness, insomnia, feeling sick of life. More and more of this soliloquizing, because I haven’t got a soul left, apart from Hoeller not a soul, left alone with myself in Hoeller’s garret, I haven’t a chance of ever leaving Hoeller’s garret (May 7). A prison, a prison to soliloquize in (May 9), so Roithamer. We read a book, we’re reading ourselves, so we loathe reading, so Roithamer, we never open another book, we don’t permit ourselves to read anymore. To hear and see (May 11), so Roithamer. We can’t always exist at the highest pitch of intensity, so we start to slow down in our thinking and doing (feeling), so that after a while we can go back to thinking, doing, feeling with even greater intensity, and in this way we can eventually reach ever greater degrees of intensity; as long as we haven’t crossed the border, the extreme limits, we’re not crazy, so Roithamer. In contemplation of the yellow paper rose, nothing else (June 3). We always go too far, so as not to fall short, we always bring our plans to realization, relentlessly against all opposition and especially against ourselves, we go to the extreme, but without breaking through the final barrier, so Roithamer.

We always go on to the absolute limit, we don’t shy away from that, just as we don’t shy away from death. One day, in a single instant, we’ll break through the final barrier, but the moment hasn’t come yet. We know how, but we don’t know when. It makes no difference whether I go back to England from Austria or back to Austria from England, so Roithamer. We still have a reason not to cross the final barrier. We’re tempted to do it, we don’t do it, so Roithamer, we keep thinking: do it, don’t do it, consistency, in consistency, until we cross the final barrier. Science for one thing, my plan, the Cone, for another, supreme happiness/supreme unhappiness, in creating and fulfilling something extraordinary we’ve arrived at nothing more than what everyone else also arrives at, nothing but solitude, so Roithamer. When a body is acted upon by external forces besides its weight it tips over on one side of the base if the (so-called) weight (vector) acts along a line through the so-called center-of-mass that intersects the supporting surface outside the base of the body; in the case of a stable equilibrium, the weight vector points inside the base, in the case of an unstable equilibrium it points exactly toward the tilting edge of the base, “tilting edge of the base” underlined. We always went too far, so Roithamer, so we were always pushing toward the extreme limit. But we never thrust ourselves beyond it. Once I have thrust myself beyond it, it’s all over, so Roithamer, “all” underlined. We’re always set toward that predetermined moment, “predetermined moment”

underlined. When that moment has come, we don’t know that it has come, but it is the right moment. We can exist at the highest degree of intensity as long as we live, so Roithamer (June 7). The end is no process. Clearing.

A Note About the Author

Thomas Bernhard, born in 1931, lives in Ohlsdorf, Upper Austria. One of the most important and internationally acclaimed writers in the German language today, he is the author of Gargoyles (1970), The Lime Works (1973), and of numerous plays. His three forthcoming volumes of autobiography are currently being translated.

A Note About the Translator

Sophie Wilkins, who lives in New York City, has translated, amongst other distinguished works, The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard, Botho Strauss’s Devotion, and the revised edition of C. W. Ceram’s Gods, Graves, and Scholars.